Sample Chapter

IMMERSED IN NOISE

To write badly is to plunge the graphic message into this
noise which interferes with reading, which transforms the reader into an
epigraphist.

Michel Serres

Sentient Sound

Noise can be understood in one sense to be that constant grating sound
generated by the movement between the abstract and empirical. It need
not be loud, for it can go unheard even in the most intense
communication. Imperfections in script, verbal pauses, and poor phrasing
are regularly passed over in the greater purpose of communication, yet
they always threaten to break out into an impassable noise and cause
real havoc. As a precautionary measure, such local impurities are
subsumed under a communication presumed to be successful, even if many
important details and larger associations are lost in the process. The
process of abstraction itself, what is lost, is thereby involved in the
elimination of noise. Noise in this way is the specific, the empirical,
even while "at the extreme limits of empiricism, meaning is totally
plunged into noise." The interesting problem arises when noise
itself is being communicated, since it no longer remains inextricably
locked into empiricism but is transformed into an abstraction of another
noise. With respect to sound, noise is an abstraction of sound, and if
the "process of abstraction ... is involved in the elimination of
noise," then noise is itself a form of noise reduction; it is something
done to sound that most often goes unheard. In the following, therefore,
the noise brought to bear on noise is the specifics of sound.

A silent figure of significant noise exists in
handwriting. There exists a basic form of letters intended to be read
without any problem whatsoever. It is a form similar to the one in front
of you at this very moment, lodged long ago in the institution of
printing. Between pure legibility and an entirely illegible scrawl there
lies a great deal of variability. Significant noise cannot be
disentangled front the specifics of such variability; it is a legibility
of an apparent illegibility. What in some cases might be considered
either undesirable or extraneousthat is, noisemight also be
read as a person's style, the result of physiological (sickness) or
environmental forces (writing on a bus), and the like. What one
considers to be a scrawl depends on who is doing the considering, when,
where, and in what capacity. Where a teacher would be intolerant of
scrawl, a graphologist would be excited by its wealth of information,
and this would not preclude the teacher who moonlights as a
graphologist. Instead of inhibiting communication, where noise exists so
too does a greater communication. For those with a large investment in
noise, this situation poses difficulties because it means that noise is
always subject to operations that render it nonexistent.

Walter Benjamin, a well-known student and teacher of
graphology, once wrote legibly enough, "Graphology has taught us to
recognize in handwriting images that the unconscious of the writer
conceals in it." He found in graphology a propensity for greater
communication through presemiotic nonsensuous similarities and
nonsensuous correspondences pertaining to what he called the
mimetic faculty and the doctrine of the similar,
contemporary manifestations of the ancient task "to read what was never
written." As such it provides a basis from which to understand
Benjamin's own idea of noise and not merely because it provides a
general impetus for reading. It may be no accident that a short
statement entitled "Noises" is strikingly similar to a statement in "One
Way Street" which is key to the understanding of the mimetic faculty.
Because they exist in different perceptual registers, before comparing
the two I need to set the stage by proposing how sound might provide an
appropriate figure to Benjamin's empathetic idea of mimetic functioning.

The mimetic faculty entails the disintegration of the
gulf separating observer and object, a separation usually held in check
through representation. In "One Way Street" Benjamin writes, "we
sentiently experience a window, a cloud, a tree not in our brains but,
rather, in the place where we see it; there we are, in looking at our
beloved, too, outside ourselves." Humans perceive the world while being
within the world; they are implicated within it and are not somehow
outside looking in or on. The object does not extend itself to the
waiting individual: the individual finds it. And if meaning and feeling
resides there, it is because the individual finds a piece of himself or
herself. The person precedes the perception, making the process an
empathetic one: the beloved is already loved, the distance has already
been traveled. But what might be the sentient means of getting
outside ourselves?

To exist to any degree where we perceive seems
perceptually awkward with respect to vision because it is not given to
an experience of spatial projection. Although light traverses the space
between an object and observer just as readily as sound does between an
action and listener, the reflection of light is understood not as an
action comparable to one that might create a sound but, because of a
constancy of action, as the result of a state. As Naum Gabo and Anton
Prevsner ask in 1920, "Look at a ray of sun.... the stillest of the
still forces, it speeds more than 300 kilometers in a second.... behold
our starry firmament.... who hears it?" Terrestrially, sound is not only
experienced as occurring in between but as surrounding the
listener, and the source of the sound is itself surrounded by its own
sound. This mutual envelopment of aurality predisposes an exchange among
presences. Baudelaire hears the wind in a tree as sighs already endowed
with empathy through observation: "First you lend the tree your
passions, your desires or your melancholy; its sighs and its
oscillations become yours and soon you are the tree." Hashish can hasten
the experience: "You are sitting and smoking; you believe that you are
sitting in your pipe, and that your pipe is smoking you;
you are exhaling yourself in bluish clouds."

Moreover, sounds can be heard coming from outside and
behind the range of peripheral vision, and a sound of adequate intensity
can be felt on and within the body as a whole, thereby dislocating the
frontal and conceptual associations of vision with an all-around
corporeality and spatiality. Michel Leiris wonders why the foliage of
the Square de Vert-Galant and thereby all of reality "remains separate
and remote? ... This is understandable where sight is concerned, the
most abstract of our senses, the one that constructs all things as
things belonging to the outside, projected at our far edges, mounted
like a stage set. Up to a point this is understandable where hearing is
concerned too, even though what strikes our ears is thereby already
penetrating us, insinuating itself smoothly or erupting violently deep
inside us." Spatial projection here begins to move between the object,
action, and observer in both directions, and here the eye is handicapped
because there is no visual equivalent to the utterance of the voice. No
matter how the idea of visuality might be activatedwhether through
the early Greek idea of eyes projecting light (Aristotle would ask of
Empedocles and Plato of the Timaeus: Okay, then why can't we see
in the dark?) or the evil eye of the objectifying gazethere is
little experiential sense of how the light of sight might be established
beyond the corporeal confines of the individual. Our eyes create
parallax across the bridge of the nose but are dependent on light from
elsewhere to constitute space, whereas our mouths emit sound that can be
heard internally and at a distance and can fill its own space. Moreover,
the voice is a good way to project perception into the world because it
shares sound with hearing. The sound of the voice returns if not in the
voice itself then in the union of utterance and audition, and it creates
the constitution and collapse of space required of a sentient getting
outside ourselves. While the centrifugal trajectory of the voice can
return to form the centripetal base for solipsism, the everyday
experience of an action at a distance is most palpable in dialogue,
where exchanges are formed by statements already framed in anticipation.
Through the figure of dialogue, an intimated voice can constitute an
acoustic spatiality in which sounds, and by extension their actions and
affiliated objects, are imbued with the returning voice of the other.
Once this process is mapped on vision, the sentient requirements of
mimesis are fulfilled.

Benjamin's comments from "One Way Street" on the
sentient experience of objects as the collapse of distance occurring as
one gets outside oneself takes on attributes of eros and desire but
especially love. Like the mimetic faculty, love always finds a greater
communication, an entranced beholding of the beloved in what
would otherwise be perceived as noise, being here the seemingly
extraneous imperfections of "Wrinkles in the face, moles, shabby
clothes, and a lopsided walk bind him more lastingly and relentlessly
than any beauty." He looked directly at the noise, not past it.
Flaws and imperfections are part and parcel of this total desiring look:

If the theory is correct that feeling is not located in the head, that
we sentiently experience a window, a cloud, a tree not in our brains
but, rather, in the place where we see it, there we are, in looking at
our beloved, too, outside ourselves. But in a torment of tension and
ravishment. Our feeling, dazzled, flutters like a flock of birds in the
woman's radiance. And as birds seek refuge in the leafy recesses of a
tree, feelings escape into the shaded wrinkles, the awkward movements
and inconspicuous blemishes of the body we love, where they can lie low
in safety. And no passer-by would guess that it is just here, in what is
defective and censurable, that the fleeting darts of adoration nestle.

His feelings are vision-borne; feelings and sight in
flight constitute the means through which he is transported. His gaze
silently follows the trajectory of the voice, and she too is silent,
without response, as she erotically receives his "fleeting darts of
adoration" into her wrinkles. But where is the voice of the beloved?
Would it rudely interrupt this docile parade of imperfection and
adorable flaws? Would a returning gaze situate him at the point from
where he saw? This would be the true test of love, since such agency
would break the silence of the beloved, although no word or sound need
occur, and she would no longer fall within the sentient experience of
objects. It would be possible to test this with Benjamin's life of love
and his well-known obsessions and determine what might be required to
interrupt his experience, whether the strength of a returned love or
just simple agency would introduce too much information into his
graphological gaze. But the unfortunate fact remains that sentience
predisposes but does not secure love for the empath. Thus, we have
competing noises, as similarities in our second passage demonstrate:

Noises. High in the empty streets of the harbor district they are
as densely and loosely clustered as butterflies on a hot flower bed.
Every step stirs a song, a quarrel, a flapping of wet linen, a rattling
of boards, a baby's bawling, a clatter of buckets. Only you have to have
strayed up here alone, if you are to pursue them with a net as they
flutter away unsteadily into the stillness. For in these deserted
corners all sounds and things still have their own silences, just as, at
midday in the mountains, there is the silence of hens, of the ax, of the
cicadas. But the chase is dangerous, and the net is finally torn when,
like a gigantic hornet, a grindstone impales it from behind with its
whizzing sting.

His steps, a voice from the feet uttered on the lower
jaw of the ground, trigger the sounds that, like feelings and birds and
butterflies, become airborne and ephemeral. Likewise, they then come to
rest in silence, in wrinkles, or in deserted corners. The silence in no
way means that the hens, ax, or cicadas have left but works instead to
affirm their presence, just as she, the beloved, is silent. Sounds
dissipate through animal behavior, not among an animism of objects.
Nevertheless, through sound the mimetic takes on another register, the
register of the other. Instead of accepting his darts a noise impales
his net, the operative space of his listening from behind the
peripheral plane of vision, of his presence more fully outside
himself. Compared to the spatiality of his net, his hearing, a
feeling located in the head betrays the visual influence of the text and
is only partially remedied as the screen's surface brings on ideas of
visual projection. Thus, the actual noise here appears to be what does
not appear, what escapes the frontal field of visual control. Benjamin's
noise speaks of the implicit dangers of becoming implicated within the
world, there is a give-and-take of power, even as it might occur as the
absent voice of the beloved suddenly making itself known in another
sound.

In contrast, Nietzsche in section 60, book 2, of
The Gay Science has differentiated his noises by gender, and this
has enabled him to know where he stands among them: "Do I still have
ears? Am I all ears and nothing else? Here I stand in the flaming surf
whose white tongues are licking at my feet; from all sides I hear
howling, threats, screaming, roaring coming at me, while the old
earth-shaker sings his aria in the lowest depths, deep as a bellowing
bull, while pounding such an earth-shaking beat that the hearts of even
these weather-beaten rocky monsters are trembling in their bodies." He
then sees a sailboat silently gliding just offshore and imagines himself
in another place amid the clamor, another attitude within life where he
could "move over existence." The silence of this sailboat turns
out to be "quiet magical beings gliding past"that is,
women. Their proximity to "the Rauschen of the waves" in
Rüdiger Campe's words, acts to rhetorically inaugurate Nietzsche's
testy discourse on what he knows best for women for the next fifteen
sections of book 2. Nietzsche's women are in fact inverted sirens: he
stands on shore while they are on the boat, and it is the call of his
own bellowing bull noise that drives him into fantasy while they no
longer sing but are silent. He is briefly seduced into thinking that a
man's better self might dwell among women, but he quickly grabs hold of
his senses, or at least his sense of hearing, to acknowledge that noise
is inevitable and that a distinction among noises must be made. This
enables himNietzsche-manto avoid drowning in his misdirected
dream about life: "Noble enthusiast, even on the most beautiful sailboat
there is a lot of noise, and unfortunately much small and petty noise."
Among the small and petty noises of these silent sirens are yet another
class of female sounds derived from antiquityrumorsthat
corrosive speech silent to men because it is kept from them, offshore,
as it were. He thus answers one of his initial questions; he is not "all
ears and nothing else" since the only one to have been covered to
completely with ears (and eyes and tongues) was the female grotesque
known as Fame or Rumor, and he keeps his distance from the sailboat,
from woman, from the source of petty noises. Indeed, Nietzsche finishes
section 60 with this warning: "The magic and the most powerful effect of
women is, in philosophical language, action at a distance, actio in
distans; but this requires first of all and above
alldistance." Nietzsche destroyed the sound that would
destroy the distance when the sirens' song was rendered silent and
maintained the distance with the gendered gulf established between the
two noises. Therefore, in these two statements, Nietzsche presumes
all women and professes distance, while Benjamin invokes a
beloved and invites dissolution.

Interpolation of Noise

The sense of an immersion in noise is guaranteed by the ease through
which so much can be perceived within it. There was a proliferation of
acts and techniques within the avant-garde for interpolating noise, most
of them related to seeing images within visual noise, as innocently as
children see animals and faces within the clouds, just a little more
intoxicated. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in Surrealism, where
such interpolation became elevated through its psychological, psychic,
and psychotic associations. While much of the avant-garde was concerned
with processes of abstraction, it was exactly the opposite for
Surrealism. The interpolation of noise was a means by which meaning was
generated from abstraction and thus corresponded directly to
Surrealism's larger project of bringing realms of reality hitherto
guarded or unknown into mimetic practice.

Salvador Dalí's paranoiac-critical method,
developed in practice from the late 1920s and named as such in his 1933
essay L'Ane pourri, sought to reproduce the "delirium of
interpretation" characteristic of paranoiacs who would see something
else in something and then something else in that: "A representation of
an object is also, without the slightest physical or anatomical change,
the representation of another entirely different object." Visual noise
overlaps with his method and comes into play in his paintings as
a means to generate imageryfor example, how the rocks of his
seaside home at Cadaqués provided the contours for the painting
The Great Masturbator (1929). Visual noise can be interpolated
similarly. The easiest way to think about it is through that well-known
optical illusion that switches back and forth between a duck and a
rabbit. Dalí established the visual punning in so many of his
paintings on the basis of such oscillationas in The
Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937), where the image of Narcissus
resting his head on his knee at the edge of a pond becomes a stone hand
holding an egg hatching a flower. Instead of presuming a range if not an
infinity of possibilities culled from a field of noise, Dalí's
paranoiac-critical method limited its attention to one proper
oscillation, lodging the unconscious in the atemporality of painting, a
frozen moment within an ongoing state of noise and process of
interpolation. Both Dalí's seeing and his painting were conditioned
by being an immersion in a discrete field of vision, whereas immersion
might be better produced through the spatiality associated with
aurality.

The images Dalí found in the seaside rocks of
Cadaqués, Antonin Artaud found among the rocks and mountains in the
land of the indigenous Tarahumara on his 1936 trip to Mexico:

When Nature, by a strange whim, suddenly shows the body of a man being
tortured on a rock, one can think at first that this is merely a whim
and that this whim signifies nothing. But when in the course of many
days on horseback the same intelligent charm is repeated, and when
Nature obstinately manifests the same idea; when the same pathetic
forms recur; when the heads of familiar gods appear on the rocks, and
when a theme of death emanates from them, a death whose expense is
obstinately borne by man; when the dismembered form of man is answered
by the forms, become less obscure, more separate from a
petrifying matter, of the gods who have always tortured him; when a
whole area of the earth develops a philosophy parallel to that of its
inhabitants; when one knows that the first men utilized a language of
signs, and when one finds this language formidably expanded on the
rocksthen surely one cannot continue to think that this is a whim,
and that this whim signifies nothing.

Within this land where "Nature has chosen to speak" he saw "a
naked man leaning out of a large window. His head was nothing but a huge
hole, a kind of circular cavity in which the sun and moon appeared by
turns, according to the time of day," and "heard" a Kabalistic "music of
Numbers ... which reduces the chaos of the material world to its
principles, explains by a kind of awesome mathematics how Nature is
ordered and how she directs the birth of the forms that she pulls out of
chaos. And everything I saw seemed to correspond to a number.... The
broken-off busts of women numbered 8; the phallic tooth ... had three
stones and four holes; the forms that became volatile numbered 12, etc."
He had walked into hills where the frothing noise of the rocks had been
frozen into Herder's Book of Nature. Artaud read this book and wrote
into another one, whereas Dalí could observe figures in the visual
noise and then reproduce them in painting, replete with noise.

Max Ernst also drew images out of visual noise,
unlike Dalí and Artaud, who culled from a preexisting field of
noise, his technique of frottage generated the noise in the first
place. His discovery of this technique was nevertheless dependent on a
preexisting noise. As the legend goes, while at an inn on a rainy day by
the seaside, he looked down on the floor and was reminded of his
childhood and how a piece of imitation mahogany produced, as he prepared
to fall asleep, a repertoire of images. He took a rubbing of the
floorboards and found within the scratches, pits, and grain all manner
of images. These images recommended themselves because they were
wrenched from an "irritated" mind far from the complacent crowd of
"Renoir's three apples, Manet's four sticks of asparagus, Derain's
little chocolate women, and the Cubists' tobacco-packet." Just as Artaud
was required to travel across the Atlantic to read nature in the noise,
Ernst used noise to remove himself from genteel Europe. Nevertheless,
amid his self-generated nature the image of Ernst's Loplop was often
divulged phoenix-like from the noise, a creature with an uncanny
resemblance to Ernst's own bird-like countenance. As with so many
techniques of interpolation, nature refracts.

Surrealism did little to shift from a visual to an
auditory mode for perceiving the world, despite its roots in the
chattering unconscious of automatism. There was, after all, a certain
prohibition against the auditive supported through the Surrealist
antipathy toward music. André Breton wrote that "Auditive images
... are inferior to visual images not only in clearness but also in
strictness, and with all due respect to a few melomaniacs, they hardly
seem intended to strengthen in any way the idea of human greatness." He,
of course, was speaking of Western art music, if not all "musical
expression, the most deeply confusing of all!" As he continued, "So may
night continue to fall upon the orchestra, and may I, who am still
searching for something in this world, may I be left with open or closed
eyes, in broad daylight, to my silent contemplation." Breton would have
found his antipathy toward Western art music confirmed by the scene in
Buñuel and Dalí's film Un Chien andalou where the
protagonist's frustrated desire is represented in his attempt to return
to the woman, pulling a contraption consisting of ropes over each
shoulder towing two bound priests and grand pianos with dead donkeys
draped across the strings, their heads spilling out over the keyboard.
Dalí, who placed music at the low point in the hierarchy of the
arts, cut back the lips of the donkeys to stress the visual pun between
their teeth and the keys of the piano.

Breton did celebrate films that were innovative in
their use of sound, such as Luis Buñuel's L'Age d'or, in
which mad love is accompanied by the sound of cowbells. Back home after
having been separated by the crowd from her lover Don X, the daughter of
the bourgeois walks into her room to find a large bovine on her bed.
Sternly instructing it to leave, the cow bell lingers long after the
creature has toppled off the bed and sauntered out of the room. As the
woman reflects in front of the vanity mirror on Don X being led down the
street by two officials, the dog barking at him mixes with the sound of
the bell. then both sounds join gently effusive music combined with the
sound of the wind as the woman, her hair blowing back, looks into the
mirror filled with sky.

Breton seems to have associated the auditive too
closely with the musical and thereby restricted the possibilities for
techniques for interpolating auditive noise. Such techniques were,
nevertheless, just one small step away from Surrealism, give or take a
few centuries. Ernst found precedent for his noise-generating techniques
in Leonardo da Vinci's Treatise on Painting, in which he proposed
throwing a sponge soaked in different colors up against a wall and
finding landscapes in the blotch of paint. Where Ernst remained within a
visual register, Leonardo himself related this technique to how one
could hear a multitude of voices in chiming bells. Under the sectional
title What to augment and stimulate the mind toward various
discoveries, Leonardo wrote:

I shall not fail to include among these precepts a new discovery, an aid
to reflection, which, although it seems a small thing and almost
laughable, nevertheless is very useful in stimulating the mind to
various discoveries. This is: look at walls splashed with a number of
stains or stones of various mixed colors. If you have to invent some
scene, you can see there resemblances to a number of landscapes, adorned
in various ways with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, great plains,
valleys and hills. Moreover, you can see various battles, and rapid
actions of figures, strange expressions on faces, costumes, and an
infinite number of things, which you can reduce to good, integrated
form. This happens thus on walls and varicolored stones, as in the sound
of bells, in whose pealing you can find every name and word you can
imagine.

The exceedingly complex and ever-changing acoustical patterns within the
sound of bells set up a field of auditory noise out of which Leonardo
heard voices. Although he mentions voices in the most dispassionate,
technical manner, a passionate person like Joan of Arc could hear
angelic voices. The fact that angels filled bells is in itself
significant, for in these emblems of the church one person might hear
hosannas while another might hear the rustling straps before a flogging.
The call to community can be for the purposes of a stoning, just as
rough music could celebrate a wedding or punish a sexual transgression.

By 1944 Breton began to revise his position. When
asked by Virgil Thomson to assess his position on music for publication
in Modern Music, he took the opportunity to reassess it. In his
essay "Silence Is Golden" he proposes an auditive practice that, in its
fusion of music and poetry, would "unify, re-unify hearing to the
same extent that we must determine to unify, re-unify sight."
This does not mean a "closer collaboration between musician and poet"
because that would be only more examples of poems set to music, and they
are almost as pathetic as the "silly nonsense of opera librettos."
Instead, he celebrated the way surrealist writers have already
discovered the tonal value of words, not in their external
auditive characteristics but at the point of their psychological
generation where "the `inner word' is absolutely inseparable from `inner
music'" and where "inner thinking is free to tune itself to the `inner
music' which never leaves it." Thus, he writes, "Great poets have
been auditives, not visionaries." However, musical practice is
still awaiting its commensurate fusion with the poetics of "inner words"
and Breton, lacking the vocabulary to speak with musicians, is unable to
point them in the direction of "the virgin soil of sound."

Protean Noise

Interpolating significance from a field of noise can be a private
affair, perhaps communicable only through debased means if at all, its
techniques breaking down along lines of perception and media.
Cadaqués is immediately perceptible in Dalí's The Great
Masturbator, but we must take Artaud's word for his vision in
Mexico. Hearing voices or sounds within auditory noise becomes another
matter altogether. Breton might compare Apollinaire's laugh to "the same
noise as a first burst of hailstones on a window pane" but hundreds of
bursts of hailstones on hundreds of window panes would never pry it from
metaphor. Nevertheless, when it comes to hearing voices in water, the
experience is so common that the manner in which the call and response
takes place within the white noise is significant in itself. Away from
the sustained noises of waves, the human voice dominates the social
enclaves of the arts; once the voice engages the sea, it declares its
designs on the nature of utterance and audition. The full conceit of the
human utterance was demonstrated in F. T. Marinetti's early poetry,
where the loudness of the sea was a test of Demosthenean oratorical
power and the sea's sustained sound stretching over the horizon an
expanse given over to one's dominance and immortality. But when it comes
to listening, so many things are heard in the noise of the sea and
waters that it is no coincidence that Proteus, the quick-change artist,
is also the old man of the sea. While in the New Testament the voices of
the multitudes are to be heard in the turbulent waters, Vicente Huidobro
listened to sea sounds in Altazor and heard the voice commanding
all multitudes speaking, casually:

Then I heard the Creator speak, nameless, just a simple hole in space,
as beautiful as a navel:

"I made a great noise and this noise made the ocean
and the ocean's waves.

"This noise will be tied to the sea's waves forever
and the sea's waves will forever be tied to it, like stamps to a
postcard."

A little later the Creator "drank a little cognac (for the
hydrography)." It was this creator who sat down with Jack Kerouac, ample
sweet wine in hand, for a conversation in wavespeak in his
autobiographical novel Big Sur (1962). Kerouac, former merchant
marine and close reader of Melville, was already an alcohol-sodden
victim of fame when Lawrence Ferlinghetti, fellow Beat and editor of
City Lights Books, invited him to stay in his cabin in Big Sur, just
south of San Francisco, to dry up and find his bearings in the midst of
nature. But Kerouac would become as uncomfortable with isolation as he
was with fame, finding voices of the multitude where there were none.
The more benign voices arose from the most powerful source, the ocean
waves crashing on the rocks and shore, just a short walk down from the
cabin:

I'd go to ... my corner by the cliff not far from one of the caves and
sit there like an idiot in the dark writing down the sound of the waves
in the notebook page (secretarial notebook).... One night I got
scared anyway so sat on top of 10-foot cliff at the foot of the big
cliff and the waves are going "Rare, he rammed the gate rare""Raw
roo roar""Crowsh"the way waves sound especially at
nightThe sea not speaking in sentences so much as in short lines:
"Which one? ... the one ploshed? ... the same ah Boom" ... Writing down
these fantastic inanities actually but yet I felt I had to do it because
James Joyce wasn't about to do it now he was dead.

His onomatopoetic record of this interpolative
immersion melding his "noisy brains" with the voices of the waves was
formed into the poem "`Sea': Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Bug Sur" of
which the following is an excerpt:

The other source of water was from a creek that ran by the cabin. At
first Kerouac would sit and listen contemplatively, much like Gochiku,
whom he had no doubt come across in Allan Watts's The Way of Zen:

The long night; The sound of the water Says what I think.

But the little sounds and voices of the creek would eventually taunt him
as he moved closer to a nervous breakdown:

The creek gurgles and thumps outsideA creek having so many voices
it's amazing, from the kettledrum basin deep bumpbumps to the little
gurgly feminine crickles over shallow rocks, sudden choruses of other
singers and voices from the log dam, dibble dabble all night long and
all day long the voices of the creek amusing me so much at first but in
the later horror of that madness night becoming the babble and rave of
evil angels in my head.

He had intended to dry up amid the natural environs
of Big Sur, but a steady diet of sweet wine and little foodone
friend reprimanded him for being the only Frenchman without a taste for
dry winewould prevent him from transforming into one of Alfred
Jarry's dreaded "dipsomaniacs of aquatism" and fuel his paranoid
hallucinations. Just as weeks before, during an alcohol stupor in a San
Francisco fleabag hotel, he was unable to distinguish between the
moaning of the other drunks on the floor and his own, the sounds of the
creek became a menacing stream of consciousness, as though the sounds
met and melted in his liver in an embodiment of Platonic acoustics: "And
now a babble in the creek has somehow entered my head and with all the
rhythm of the sea waves going `Kettle blomp you're up, you rop and dop,
ligger lagger ligger' I grab my head but it keeps babbling." Because
"everything is overeverything is swarming all over me" the babble
becomes an enlightened harbinger of death, an auditory
Doppelgänger, begging Kerouac to cut it out of his forehead with
the same lobotomy that had been performed on Allen Ginsberg's mother
(Ginsberg silenced his own voices through chanting). Unlike the loud,
dazzling sound of crashing waves, the creek babble was too soft to drown
out his noisy brains ("my mind is just a series of explosions that get
louder and louder and more `multiply' broken in pieces some of them big
orchestral and then rainbow explosions of sound and sight mixed") and
too pathetic to be recuperated into poetry ("Ah the keselamaroyot you
rot"). He was immersed in water voices on his own level, and as he
degenerated, so did they. Like Nietzsche knee deep in the
Rauscben of the waves, Kerouac could answer the threats of the
old earth shaker but was overrun by gentleness and silence.

Kerouac is best known for having listened to jive and
jazz and incorporating them into his writing style. He is less known for
listening to the deep bass and hiss of pounding seas, the slurred
sibilants of the waves, the vicious babble of other waters.
Nevertheless, the "voice" associated with his style may have been close
to immersion in the sound of waters all along. Allen Ginsberg said that
Kerouac's most important attribute was "a reason founded on sounds
rather than a reason founded on conceptual associations," an auditory
"modality of consciousness" that occurred at the point of transformation
when "he was suddenly aware of the sound of language, and got swimming
in the seas of sound, got lost swimming in the seas of sound, and guided
his intellect on sound rather than on dictionary associations with the
meanings of the sounds." Indeed, in his own "Essentials of Spontaneous
Prose" Kerouac modeled his consciousness on the sea: "Not `selectivity'
of expression but following free deviation (association) of mind into
limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought, swimming in sea of English."

Oscillator Noise

Kerouac's consciousness may have developed through swimming in a sea of
English. His technique of interpolation nevertheless took place in a sea
of sea sounds. Yet what happens when such privatized audition occurs
within a sea of language as incomprehensible as the noise of the sea?
People with hearing difficulties live with processes of significant
noise on a daily basis. Where the graphologist might find greater
communication in noise, for individuals who are hard of hearing it is
often difficult to determine the first line of meaning. Partial deafness
and noise breed and feed on homophony, a device that almost always
operates unconsciously as a salvaging maneuver but that can also be used
more deliberately as a source of enjoyment. While resourcefully weaving
phonemes and vocables through anticipation and recursion, generating
options and making choices of what may be appropriate or at least
plausible in the context, the range of communications can be an arena
for play and for entertaining difference toward whatever ends. A similar
thing happens when one encounters a foreign language. Although at times
a person may listen very intently and yet go away with few tangible
rewards, it nevertheless demonstrates that the urge against all odds to
continuously make meaning from linguistic noise is very strong.

The most sustained exercise within English of
interpolating significant linguistic noise is to be found in Louis
Zukovsky's homophonic translations, or transliterations, of the Book of
Job in his poem A-15 (1964) and, with his wife Celia Zukovsky,
Catullus (1958-1969). Working with the original Hebrew and Latin
he misconstrued the sound of the language with the dual purpose of
supplying a certain synopsis in English of the original (translation of
sorts) and simultaneously fulfilling his own poetic agenda. In the
preface to Catullus the Zukovskys wrote: "This translation of
Catullus follows the sound, rhythm, and syntax of his Latintries,
as is said, to breathe the `literal' meaning with him." And among these,
according to Robert Creeley, "his first and abiding purchase on the text
is its soundmuch as if one were trying to enter the physical place
of language, making sounds like `they' do, trying to inhabit the
gestures, pace, and density of those (`objective') words." Zukovsky
himself, in reference to Catullus, once characterized the process more
roughly, and not coincidentally in the dual figure of deafness and a
tourist hailing from an officially monoglottal country, when he told a
college audience, "I'm trying to read the old passionate guy's lips like
an ignorant American."

Sometimes a familiar language can degenerate into
linguistic noise, and the experience may not be a comfortable or
productive one. It may instead reject the listener, driving the person
back into a private realm, perhaps retreating into a more serious
threat. Under the influence of hashish in a bar filled with a din of
voices, Walter Benjamin heard perfectly good French slip over into a new
dialect. He related this to a statement by Karl Kraus that pertained to
the visual process of reading: "The more closely you look at a word the
more distantly it looks back." This is an obstinate orthography
repulsing every graphological attempt to find meaning. The increased
unintelligibility encountered by Benjamin may not have been an
alienation resulting from a hashish-clouded comprehension but could have
resulted from the drug's enticement to listen, an attunement to the
noises of café banter. Foreignness could have been created as the
language spoken by an individual was atomized by a spatialized din of
combined voices, spreading quickly as a dialect back through the room.
Whatever the case may be, the transformation of speech into linguistic
noise under the influence of hashish was mild when compared to the
threat facing René Daumal under the influence of carbon
tetrachloride. What could be more frightening than to finally realize
that the noisy speech he heard was emanating from his own voice, that
the voice that was meant to give him the comfort of presence was either
unwanted magic or hopeless babbling? Only the proper cadence of an
incantation sounding his being in a battle of attunement and alienation
could ward off the truly remote from breaking through past the
infinitely close:

And all space was endlessly divided thus into circles and triangles
inscribed one within another, combining and moving in harmony, and
changing into one another in a geometrically inconceivable manner that
could not be reproduced in ordinary reality. A sound accompanied this
luminous movement, and I suddenly realized it was I who was making it.
In fact I virtually was that sound; I sustained my existence by
emitting it. The sound consisted of a chant or formula, which I had to
repeat faster and faster in order to "follow the movement" The formula
(I give the facts with no attempt to disguise their absurdity) ran
something like this: "Tem gwef rem gwef dr rr rr," with an accent on the
second "gwef" and with the last syllable blending back into the first;
it gave an unceasing pulse to the rhythm, which was, as I have said,
that of my very being. I knew that as soon as it began going too fast
for me to follow, the unnamable and frightful thing would occur. In fact
it was always infinitely close to happening, and infinitely
remote ... that is all I can say.

The experience resembles certain types of aphasia,
the hell of language where one's own meaningless speech is propelled
along an irrepressible urge to communicate. If a meaning might manifest
itself fleetingly here or there, it is only in the form of one or two
frustrating words that are one's coded appeal to what might make sense
out of life; this equals an attempt at a pathetic magic. Everyone else
follows the rules of communicationsyntactical progressions and
inflectional trajectoriesbut their speech too is totally
incomprehensible, even though they are your closest friends. They
suddenly speak another language. Your home has become a foreign country,
however hospitable. For Daumal, what was close was the assurance of the
voice per se, asserting itself through his being as it corporeally
produced the repetitive and pulsing meaninglessness, holding unknown
consequences in check. What was remote and frightening was to be driven
by communication and totally incapable of it and not to know whether
each attempt was taking you further away or closer to an unfettered
psychosis on the other side of noise.

When one's own speech is not implicated, the noise
returns to more peaceable settings. Walter Benjamin recommends that
writers at certain phases within the production of a work seek out
complex sounds: "In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity.
Semirelaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the
other hand, accompaniment by an étude or a cacophony of
voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of
the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as
touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward
thought." Jean Cocteau, on the other hand, pleads with an American
audience not to read his letter to them "while your radio is
broadcasting a programme of music with the title `Music to Read By.'"
The speech of the raucousness of cafés and other such haunts
produces in itself a figure of the social where poets and writers in
midst of the craft need not feel so alone. The dish and din can provide
a peaceful home for the overriding conflict within the very act of
writingthe gregarious motive of communication versus the solitude
of its executionby providing a chatty noise within which a
collectively discursive interlocutor can be divined, a nascent public
imagined. Café noise also models the supple field of exchange
between inner speech-sounds and those of the world and, thus, situates
the writer. Similarly it is commonplace for even the most dedicated
musical aesthete to listen at times more concertedly to the psyche than
to the concert as he or she prefigures a particular passage with an
expectation about how it should or has sounded in the past, associates a
passage with another work or with matters of the world adjusts breathing
to take in an emotive rendering or suppresses a coughall those
apperceptual processes that constitute listening. Baudelaire's
experience on hashish was but an amplification of an infinite number of
conditions and settings where the same takes place: "I will not try to
tell you that I listened to the players; you know that's quite
impossible; now and then, my stream of thought would seize on some
sentence fragment, and, like an able dancer, would use it as a
trampoline, to spring to distant dreams."

Oscillating between stage and seat, constantly
interrupting or melding in a mix that is, ironically, the means through
which an idea of unity is negotiated. Again, Baudelaire confirms this as
he continues his description: "You might suppose that a play heard in
this way would lack logic and connection; allow me to enlighten you; I
found a very subtle meaning in the drama spun by my distracted state of
mind. Nothing fazed me." There is a constant state of interruption,
shattering the continuity of the music because the "stage" is always
oscillating from one location to the other, at times entirely masking
one or ephemerally fusing the two. Moreover, this mix is the very
process through which some idea of a unity is brought to bear on the
actual profusion and disparity of phenomena. In other words, it is
through interruption that the semblance of a continuous integrity is
established; it is only through noise that the famed ephemerality of
music is secured as ephemeral. In the café where the sound is not
the object of thought, the mix is exteriorized and thus brings unity to
an inaudible intellectual life by providing an atmospheric dispensary
for tangents as a stand-in for sociality.

Elsewhere, Benjamin mentions this occurring outside
the café: "When Dickens went traveling, he repeatedly complained
about the lack of street noises and activities which were indispensable
to him for his production. `I cannot express how much I want these [the
streets],' he wrote in 1846 from Lausanne while he was working on
Dombey and Son. `It seems as if they supplied something to my
brain, which it cannot bear, when busy, to lose.'" Benjamin then cites
George Simmel in noting a silence and a silencing of the social
operating through the modern city's predilection for visuality:

Someone who sees without hearing is much more uneasy than someone who
hears without seeing. In this there is something characteristic of the
sociology of the big city. Interpersonal relationships in big cities are
distinguished by a marked preponderance of the activity of the eye over
the activity of the ear. The main reason for this is the public means of
transportation. Before the development of buses, railroads, and trams in
the nineteenth century, people had never been in a position of having to
look at one another for long minutes or even hours without speaking to
one another.

Ostensibly, the reduced social products of a preponderance of sight
would give way to the gregarious texts written alone among the sounds of
bohemian hubbub. Fields of significant sound constituted by café
speech may indeed suffice, as may the less homogenous sounds of big city
streets, because they invoke the phenomenal depths articulated by
language, as opposed to the surfaces of visual imagery, signage
included. But they only go so far. They only offer better aid than none
since, as Leonardo says, "those stains give you inventions, they will
not teach you to finish any detail."